Textbooks coming to the Google Play Store

Students can buy textbooks for classes or rent at a discounted rate.

Textbooks are coming to the Book section of the Google Play store, Google announced at its breakfast event this morning.

Android users will be able to rent or purchase textbooks from all five of the major academic publishing houses. Rental periods will be for six months and will be discounted up to 80 percent from their normal purchase price.

Users reading Google Play textbooks will be able to search through the full text, create bookmarks, and highlight passages. Additionally, a "night reading" mode will keep things readable at low light levels—something to help students power through late-night cram sessions without waking up their roommates.

Textbooks will be available on the Google Play store in early August. Detailed pricing and specifics on the exact titles available have not yet been announced.

But, but, how are the textbook publishers going to continue to earn their huge margins for releasing a new edition (several minor edits) every semester if they can't capture the full price from each and every student?

But, but, how are the textbook publishers going to continue to earn their huge margins for releasing a new edition (several minor edits) every semester if they can't capture the full price from each and every student?

Won't someone please think of the publishers?

I haven't looked into it seriously, but I'm not sure publishers do earn huge profit margins. The problem is low volume. Only a very few textbooks are best sellers but it costs just as much to put out a book that sells only a few hundred copies as one that sells ten thousand. No textbook is ever going to sell in Harry Potter quantities.

I used The B&N option last semester for a class, it was amazing how much easier it was to stay on task when I didn't have to look away from my laptop to reference a book or copy/paste to receive additional info online about something particularly interesting in the section we were covering. Having a competitor seems nice, if the prices end up being any different.

Google has recently amended their publisher policies to accept ePub 3 books. Looks like this was a preparatory step for a textbook launch, since ePub2 is a nightmare for complex layouts. iBooks had a rocky start, but developed into the best ePub3 reader around (partly because there aren't that many available), it will be nice to see some decent competition coming from Google.

I'm interested to see where this goes (especially book lending!) but for me, the biggest factor (other than lock-in, of course) is that the Kindle software is pretty much everywhere, and it comes with really useful tools. Some of the more long-form things I have written involved perusing through multiple books for quotes, mining for very specific passages (most of my older books are dog-eared and full of highlighter fluid and post-its).

What Kindle does is to sync those highlights, and present them all in a nice list. So if I'm looking for a quote from a book, I can pull up every single thing I've highlighted and simply paste it in there.

Now, what Amazon lacks is other services. Google has quite the open window here. I thought, when Microsoft got into bed with Nook, that they had a shot at something cool-- the ability to quote from sources like books, and have the book metadata get dropped right into the Word document (so, quoting from a book automatically puts in ALA-style footnotes or endnotes, and drops the book into your bibliography).

Google, unlike Amazon, has google docs, and can actually accomplish this (they can also do this with Chrome, making quoting anything a breeze). Google, unlike Microsoft, also has the ability to execute quickly on this.

So Google: you have the books. Cool. Now make sure that you do more than just sell them. Offer tools superior to Amazon for books, offer more powerful tools for google docs, and make docs play well with these books and with Chrome, and maybe I'll start buying books from you, rather than Amazon.

80% discount on $800+ in books a semester would make me one happy college kid. The one feature that would make this even better is, in the case that I find a book I've rented particularly useful, I could get a discounted price on purchasing that book within the rental period.

While I'm a fan of this on principle (like Bob.Brown, I teach university classes), I worry about the impact it will have on the actual READING of text books.

I teach computer science, so we spend a lot of time on the computer. A lot of our books are not available electronically, for whatever reason.

Then we have books like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books that are excellent with digital editions.

What I've found though, is that students who only have the e-copies are less likely to actually do the reading. I don't know if this is the "I don't want to be on my computer" issue, or the "oh look, someone facebooked me" issue that is causing it. But the simple separation of text from internet connected device seems to lend itself to actually reading the material.

This is purely anecdotal, of course. My classes tend to use the textbook pretty heavily, since if I'm making them buy it, they better get a lot of use out of it, right?

While I'm a fan of this on principle (like Bob.Brown, I teach university classes), I worry about the impact it will have on the actual READING of text books.

I teach computer science, so we spend a lot of time on the computer. A lot of our books are not available electronically, for whatever reason.

Then we have books like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books that are excellent with digital editions.

What I've found though, is that students who only have the e-copies are less likely to actually do the reading. I don't know if this is the "I don't want to be on my computer" issue, or the "oh look, someone facebooked me" issue that is causing it. But the simple separation of text from internet connected device seems to lend itself to actually reading the material.

This is purely anecdotal, of course. My classes tend to use the textbook pretty heavily, since if I'm making them buy it, they better get a lot of use out of it, right?

I don't want to be a pessimist but it's up to 80% off. While I appreciate more competition, this isn't exactly new. Amazon already offers discounts (personally I've seen up to ~60% for rentals) and allows users to contribute the full amount they paid towards the purchase price should they choose to buy it.

How do books on Play work? Are they locked to my account or is it possible to copy it to a non android device/computer? If not, totally not for me.

On a tangent I can say I'm still not a fan of ebooks actually. Partly because I just love books, I like the smell of them, I like to hold them. I've tried e-readers/tablets but it feels like no device is an end all solution. The high resolution tablets come pretty close, but I just cannot justify getting one (also I cannot afford one). Not to mention most books I want do not exists as e-books.

How do books on Play work? Are they locked to my account or is it possible to copy it to a non android device/computer?

You can read Google Play books on anything with a browser. There are native apps for Android and iOS and a 3rd-party app for Windows Phone. If you want offline mobility you can (in most cases, but not all) download the .acsm file needed to transfer the book to anything that runs Adobe's DRM system, which covers any commercial ePub reader.

Starting a couple of months ago, you can also upload your own (DRM-free) ePub or PDF books to the Google Play servers. Books will synchronise across devices (i.e. read on one device, open on another and it will automatically open at the last page you were on).

whether or not this will be any good boils down to: what do you get, and for how much? you can resell physical textbooks, can you do this with digital? if the price for a digital "rental" is equal to how much you'd get back from the textbook store, that might sell some people.... but personally, i'd still get textbooks, because there were usually one or two per semester i deemed worth keeping. it would have to get down to 1/3 of the price before i would accept a digital "rental." buying a permanent digital license is even more complicated to do cost/benefit.... will the software work forever? is it web based? will it go away someday? do you get the edition updates? etc....

Anyone on campus have a feel for how big book piracy is? I'm curious if there are pdf torrents of all the popular text books (1st & 2nd year stuff). 2 thoughts:

Will Universities buy a site licence for intro textbooks?How easy will it be to take a screen shot of the text book and pass it around (yeah, you lose some of the reader functionality, but free is free).

Anyone on campus have a feel for how big book piracy is? I'm curious if there are pdf torrents of all the popular text books (1st & 2nd year stuff).

I did a BSc 2004-2008 and MSc 2010-2012. I stopped buying textbooks in 2006 because almost every single one of them was widely available as pdfs either on dedicated torrent sites for textbooks, or on the various cyberlockers across the web. It never did make sense to me to pay almost 1000% more for a textbook I'll only ever read once in my life vs a great book I might read multiple times over the course of just a few years.

This is a great step. Do the digital pages sync up with a specific written version? If these books have to be used to write papers I am curious if there is a fixed method for citing digital copies (such as Kindle or other e-book versions) where page numbers are arbitrary.

While I'm a fan of this on principle (like Bob.Brown, I teach university classes), I worry about the impact it will have on the actual READING of text books.

I teach computer science, so we spend a lot of time on the computer. A lot of our books are not available electronically, for whatever reason.

Then we have books like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books that are excellent with digital editions.

What I've found though, is that students who only have the e-copies are less likely to actually do the reading. I don't know if this is the "I don't want to be on my computer" issue, or the "oh look, someone facebooked me" issue that is causing it. But the simple separation of text from internet connected device seems to lend itself to actually reading the material.

This is purely anecdotal, of course. My classes tend to use the textbook pretty heavily, since if I'm making them buy it, they better get a lot of use out of it, right?

In my case teaching a foreign language, I find the students using the electronic edition don't suffer much if at all, but there's the very nice added benefit of audio being integrated directly so they don't have to keep track of a dozen CDs to hear certain passages. But that's for the first year text we use, and students who get the printed version get access to the electronic edition at no extra cost (something I wish more publishers would allow).

The electronic editions I've seen for the second year texts (much lower print counts than first year texts) are terrible, some of them are basically just JPEG scans of the pages using awkward custom-made interfaces for zooming with outrages extra costs to get print and e-book combos; needless to say we only use print editions in that case. So I think this entirely dependent on the actual quality of the e-book.

Do US Universities not have libraries? Why am I always hearing it costs students thousands of dollars every year for books?

4 years and 2 degrees (BEng & MSc) in the UK and I only bought one book that cost me £25. Libraries had multiple copies of the most important books and our lecturers taught and provided all of the basic knowledge. Combined with the advent of the internet age and the thought of needing books, let alone spending thousands of dollars on them every year is absolutely mind boggling for me.

Do US Universities not have libraries? Why am I always hearing it costs students thousands of dollars every year for books?

4 years and 2 degrees (BEng & MSc) in the UK and I only bought one book that cost me £25. Libraries had multiple copies of the most important books and our lecturers taught and provided all of the basic knowledge. Combined with the advent of the internet age and the thought of needing books, let alone spending thousands of dollars on them every year is absolutely mind boggling for me.

What is in those books that you can't find online or be taught?

Tons of stuff cannot be found online, at least if a class is based on a specific books. There are also assignments based on certain books, then you need them. And it also depends on the topic, stuff like web design has a given online presence, others does not.

But yeah thousands per semester is excaggerated I assume. I can very well imagine hundreds though.

Do US Universities not have libraries? Why am I always hearing it costs students thousands of dollars every year for books?

4 years and 2 degrees (BEng & MSc) in the UK and I only bought one book that cost me £25. Libraries had multiple copies of the most important books and our lecturers taught and provided all of the basic knowledge. Combined with the advent of the internet age and the thought of needing books, let alone spending thousands of dollars on them every year is absolutely mind boggling for me.

What is in those books that you can't find online or be taught?

Tons of stuff cannot be found online, at least if a class is based on a specific books. There are also assignments based on certain books, then you need them. And it also depends on the topic, stuff like web design has a given online presence, others does not.

But yeah thousands per semester is excaggerated I assume. I can very well imagine hundreds though.

Maybe an outlier, but law students regularly spend $1000 or more each semester on textbooks. The average among other majors is between $500-800. The library usually doesn't have all of the books available, unless the professor puts it on reserve, even then it's usually a copy he's bought for that purpose. I went to University of Montana, a smallish (~15,000 students) liberal arts school, so YMMV.

We definitely do have libraries. The issue is when you have a class of over 100 people, there simply aren't enough to go around.

As for why do we use books at all? Look at something like Stevens' UNIX book. Or his networking book. Or K&R.

Why should I, as someone teaching the class, waste valuable class time replicating what is in the text book? That's why we HAVE textbooks. Students are expected to spend 3 hours per credit hour OUTSIDE of class working on the class. Reading only takes a small portion of that, leaving more than enough for homework.

Textbooks exist for a reason. It gives us something to refer to, a baseline to which to hold the students. It also, in many cases, explains things in ways that we don't. This has the benefit of providing multiple views of a topic to the students.

Students here pay an average of $300-$400 per term on texts, depending on the classes they are taking. The books in my classes range from $120 (a book that is used multiple terms) to $70 (comes with the ebook for free).

Then again, CS is a field where there is a LOT of incorrect information on websites (looking at you, stackexchange!), but we can reasonably be sure the textbooks are more or less correct. And for standards based things, don't change much from year to year.

How do books on Play work? Are they locked to my account or is it possible to copy it to a non android device/computer? If not, totally not for me.

Not only are they locked into your account, you lose access to them after six months. You're paying to RENT, not buy. I kept my college textbooks for years after graduation. Now you won't even have your september textbooks after may.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.